


Student of Many Things

by Acciofirewhiskey



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Apprentice Fic, F/M, Golden Queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 03:05:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acciofirewhiskey/pseuds/Acciofirewhiskey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Golden Queen. Post We Are Both. Young bride, Regina is disappointed in her marriage bed. Rumpelstiltskin offers instruction. Smut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Student of Many Things

**Author's Note:**

> Dub-con-y, of sorts. A ficlet turned 3300 words.

The first time is not long after the wedding.

 

Leopold’s not touched her since that night (despite fanfare, there’d been no honeymoon—they’d married to give Snow a mother, not ensure the bloodline persisted, after all), and whether from age or simple exhaustion of a ruler in the middle of the makings of what might become the third Ogre War, and as much she hates the fact, because she doesn’t, couldn’t possible, love him, she feels jilted.

 

Of course, she’d been a virgin.

 

With Daniel there’d been stolen kisses before teatime, the long embrace, and one night she’d fallen asleep in the stables, but there’d been clothes enough between them. She’d known what to expect, but still, she’d been a maid.

 

At least the king had been gentle.

 

He’d said little to the fidgeting bride, hands shaking with nerves she’d not expected, not felt since the night she pushed her mother in the mirror (easily enough explained away—her mother returned to the homelands, at word of a death of a distant relation, or some such, and her father had spread the lie throughout the court. The king frowned and said how unfortunate, for Snow had already become fond of her grandmother).

 

He’d spoken of the crowds at the wedding, how popular with the people his daughter was, as he moved about the room, taking off the gilded garment for the occasion (sparing him a quick and fleeting look, his wife wonders if it looks anything like the one he wore for his first wedding). As he’d sat down on the edge of the large canopy bed, removing his crown, undoing the cufflinks on his wrists, he spoke of the meal: good wine, but the potatoes a bit tough, not in season yet.

 

Regina agreed, clearing her throat, adjusting for the hundredth time the negligee her mother picked for her trousseau, lace and pearls and everything fitted to perfection (completely uncomfortable, though it’s silk from the Orients). The man slipped himself into the bed, lifted the covers, as he rubbed his eyes, for his bride to do the same. As he’d moved over her, Regina froze completely--he leant past her, to blow out the candle. “You know how it goes,” he said in the dark, in his old man’s voice (and it’s not a question, Leopold never asks her questions, since that one, the only one, the proposal).

 

Regina nodded hastily, frenzied. She doesn’t know if Leopold hardly saw it in the dark.

 

It’s over quick, and the next day, finds her sore with stained nightgown and sheets. She finds it all a little overdone, anticlimactic. She feels more emptied, than she ought, for the body returns to a way in which she’d hardly known that anything was missing in that space deep within, between her legs, and once the soreness passes, only the loneliness remains.

 

But a week later, Leopold’s returned that evening from a meeting with one of the lesser lords whose lands border the growing unrest. They’d feasted, and earlier in the night, as she’d prepared, she’d found herself wondering which pair of earrings he’d like best, how she ought prepare her hair. “Snow?”

 

The little girl looks up from where she plays with her dolls on Regina’s rugs—it does not miss the new queen’s observation that the main player in her stepdaughter’s games looks like her, rides a toy horse and men’s trousers. She plaits the dolls black hair. “Yes?”

 

“What color is your father’s favorite?”

 

The child puts a pudgy finger to her chin. “Green.”

 

Regina nods and then sighs. Green, it would be (the color of Snow’s mother’s eyes, perhaps—her mother could have conjured a fair enough image of the late queen using a mirror or a shallow bowl of water, but alas, that’s no longer an option). The king greets her, and when the people call for the couple to kiss, he brushes her powdered cheek, makes no notice of the emeralds in her ears, at her neck.

 

Still that night, as she lies abed, wearing another intricate, silk nightgown from her wedding bundle, she waits for Leopold, but when the hour grows first late and then early, Regina knows he will not be visiting her chambers. She sighs in frustration, and fights off the desire to cry. It’s not that she desires so much to be filled by him, with him, but rather, the desire to be desired. Regina wonders over the lack of pain, she’d felt a growing _Something_ the night the king had taken her maidenhead, a Something she could hardly describe, but it made her gasp.

 

An _Impatience_ , perhaps. 

 

Yes, at the more than ripe age of twenty, she knows ofthe needs of the body, read a secret romance or two that speak of the bliss of joining, and she’s felt around, in the lower places on her body, but never has she felt more than that odd Something, that Impatience. Still, she can think of little else, as she lies alone, in the bed large enough for two—a rich two, at that.

 

It’s a cool, fresh night outside, and the balcony doors lie open as usual, and so, Regina decides to indulge, lying atop her covers. She breathes the fresh night air, thinks of the comforts of home, the smell of fresh hay and leather tack, and hesitantly, lets her hand drag upward, beneath her gown. She teases her sensitive thighs (the king had done little more than locate them, but Regina takes her time, fiddling around with idle hands, unsure of what exactly they ought to be doing, closing her eyes--

 

“Having a bit of fun, dearie?”

 

Regina starts, looking straight at Rumpelstiltskin, leant against the edge of her wardrobe. “I was just—“ she stutters, out (but lying down, nightgown hitched, hand caught between spread legs, she’s not exactly in a position to hide what she’d been doing).

 

“Oh, I know exactly what you were _just_ ,” he chuckles. The imp waltzes to the fireplace and flops down onto a chaise lounge there, and with arms behind his head, ankles crossed, he looks more at home in her room than she or Leopold has ever looked (the only one ever looking so at ease, being Snow). “Don’t let me stop you, dearie,” he adds, smirking.

 

Regina frowns at his quip, as she sits at the edge of the bed, having adjusted the nightgown back into modesty. She tries to discreetly wipe her hand on the rumpled sheet beside her thigh, and imagines she fails, when his wide, wide, impossibly wide eyes scan down to it before returning to her face. She swallows and adjusts her collar, “You keep appearing,” she says, taking her time, “You could warn me, or something.” It’s a question, not a statement, “knock, maybe?”

 

Rumpelstiltskin sits up and swings his legs around, elbows high, hands on his knees, answering, “Now where’s the fun in that?” When Regina doesn’t reply, he slowly rises, and with hands behind his back, twirls over to her desk. He plays with her things, one by one, her gilded gilt hairbrush, pins and bobbins, her jewels. She watches him entranced. Suddenly, he looks up, into the mirror hanging right in front of his head, his eyes meeting her through the reflection, “So was it not everything you’d hoped?”

 

She tilts her head, and blinks like a lamb, “Was what?” Her voice is all innocence and light. 

 

His lip curls, and he answers, low and dark, like a cave, or a thing hidden deep inside, “Why the marriage bed, of course.”

 

Her cheeks color instantly, “Oh.”

 

He makes a gleeful little noise, “Mhm.”

 

Her eyes flit from her lap to the mirror and back before she answers him. “No, not exactly.” She sighs looking up, into the fireplace as she speaks, and in that moment she wishes her mother was there to speak with about all this, “He wasn’t mean. It’s just…” her words trail off, because she’d no more left to make sense of her feelings, her formless thoughts.

 

“Not everything the storybooks make it out to be?” he asks, and Regina jumps again, because he’s close, much closer, standing at the edge of the bed, hands on the footboard, leaning past the posts.

 

And yet, she finds herself agreeing, “Yes.”

 

He chuckles, and crinkling his nose, Rumpelstiltskin says, “Never is, however,” and then, he’s pushed himself from the headboard to strut around to stand on her left, “there are other ways to find--how shall we say--” he makes a humming sound and waves his hands before finally finding in his mind (and oh, she can see it, the way his mind flits and finds) the word he’d been searching for, steepling his fingers, “ _Satisfaction_.”

 

Regina’s brown eyes go wide, and she blushes, thinking of what she’d heard the scullery maids talking about, before the cook had stumbled upon them and scolded them to get back to their washboards, what she’d read about, in books her mother would never have allowed, “I know of _that_ ,” she says, quietly, but shakes her head, “but I don’t know if I could—no, I could never.” She shrugs, her shoulders raising to bear the awkward weight of her confession.

 

“I could show you, if you like.”

 

Her head snaps up to face him. “ _Rumpelstiltskin_ ,” she says, his name coloring to the horror of the lewd suggestion. “I am married.”

 

“Oh, I‘m well aware of that, dearie.” He stares at her before turning on his heel seamlessly, “but the fact remains that you’re seeking…” He waves his hands dramatically, as if summoning the clouds in from the sky past the balcony. They’re full clouds tonight, and shine with the light of the moon. “… Relief, _freedom,_ and did I not promise to teach you those things?”

 

“Well yes, but—“

 

“And is this any different?” He questions as he paces, the fire behind him, casting shadows over her every now and again. “Just another lesson, I should say.” He stops, and swivels in his leather boots with so many straps, almost as many straps as the laces on the back of her elaborate wedding gown. “It’s a small lesson, hardly a trifling thing, and I do ever so much wish to be a thorough teacher.”

 

She thinks for a moment. He did promise to train her. They’d made a deal, after all.

 

“Won’t you let me teach you, dearie?” He asks, as if reading her thoughts, her bending will.

 

He prods her as he did with the mirror, with her mother, with her mother’s book, with magic, and now with this. Yes, he wants to prod, and to push, and to teach. He knows how to do all these things, and Regina does so very much want to learn, after all, to be a good student.

 

“Alright,” she says to Rumpelstiltskin, his features dark, back to the fire.

 

He smiles, and he drops his hand, “I thought so.” With meticulous steps he stalks toward her (and she desires to back away, but sitting knees against the edge of the bed, she’s nowhere to go). When he stands close enough to touch, he asks, “well?”

 

Regina’s eyes go wide “What?”

 

“Come, come, make room now, dearie,” He brings up his hands, palms down, gestures for her to move backward.

 

“Oh, right,” she says, shaking her head. As she scoots back, her nightgown catches on the bedclothes. She doesn’t correct it.

 

He makes a contented sound, almost a child’s giggle, and hops down onto the bed, bouncing himself (and Regina too) in the process. Once the mattress settles, the few dislodged feathers floating from where the jump had tossed them, the teacher smirks and crooks his finger toward Regina. “Let’s begin, shall we.” Half lain back, eyes wide, and tilted up on her elbows, she crawls back toward him, until they are perpendicular, him on his side, ankles crossed (she dares not tell him to remove his boots—he’s the teacher here, after all, it’s not her place to correct an instructor). Almost touching. “Now?” she asks, asking for guidance, for direction.

 

“Yes, now.” He answers, giving her no more clue of what to do, but then he’s moving, his hand, landing low on Regina’s thigh, almost to her knee, as if it had been there all along. She doesn’t startle from the touch, not even from the heat of his palm. Creeping, inch by inch, he gathers up the fabric, and it whispers into the room, as it slides up her legs.

 

“Oh, right,” she says, breaking the silence, remembering suddenly that the candle stills burns on her nightstand. Regina begins to sit up to blow it out, but Rumpelstiltskin puts a hand to her shoulder. Her eyes flutter, and she points to the flame, “But it’s light.”

 

“Indulge an old monster,” he says with a smile, “please.”

 

Gulping, she nods and lets him push her back to lying down. Once settled, he does not continue to pull on her nightgown, instead, nails first, his hand dives beneath, and he plays gentle scrapes over the top, and then the inside of her lower thigh. “This, like any magic, is all about where your head’s at,” he says, watching his hands, and dark green, almost black, nails move over her pale skin. “The mind, of course, is a person’s strongest magic of all.”

 

She almost corrects him, that no, love is the strongest magic, but she stops herself—he’s the teacher, after all.

 

“Very few things indeed, can top the magic of a keen mind, when at it’s best work,” he says, and when his hand points upward, moving a little closer in, he turns to look at her, “And where is your mind, my little queen, hm?”

 

‘Mine?” she asks, it’s a whisper, surprised at the direct address, and the directness of his stare.

 

“Yes, yours,” he raises an eyebrow, “not troubled over the recent loss of your mother, I hope,” he asks, but his tone admonishes.

 

“No, I’m—“ she gulps, and confesses, “I don’t know what I’m to do.”

 

“Do? What did I just say?” he says each word slowly--teacher indeed.

 

When she doesn’t answer, eyes searching his face, presumably for the answer (and all the while, his hand stays splayed around her thigh, and gods, is her thigh so small that the breadth of this small man’s hand touches that much of her at once?) he continues, “The mind,” he brings his hand away, puts the finger to her forehead, “the mind is magic. What do you do?” his hand returns to questing higher, drawing little scraping lines up, up, up her thigh. “You think,” he tells her, low, his thumbnail, sliding in that crease where leg meets torso, and she forces herself to be still for him. “Think of how it feels, what its like, where you’re headed.”

 

His middle finger finds her, slipping between her slit, and when Regina gasps with it, urges her hips forward to it, he slips deeper still, and then he laughs loudly, finding the wetness there, “Maybe you are thinking after all, little queen.”

 

She blushes, and frowning tries to sit up—his laughter having made her ashamed, young, and feeling anything but like a queen—but Rumpelstiltskin uses his other hand to push her shoulder back down, “You’re just embarrassed.”

 

It’s true, and so she lies down, lets him touch her.

 

“What’s your pleasure, I wonder?” he asks, more to himself, than to his apprentice, and using his index finger, he flicks the hard mound, twice, and when she makes a sound, almost a moan, he wrinkles his nose, “found it.”

 

He’s less hesitant after she begins to make noise, rubbing her fast and a little out of any sort of rhythm. When the young mistress (in a castle she could hardly call hers) makes a keening sound, he cups her, and with his other hand covers her mouth, “Quiet, your majesty—I won’t always be here to cast a silencing spell about your walls, so until you learn the spell yourself, you’ll have to keep your pleasuring to the quiet kind of relief, dearie.”

 

He moves his hand away, raises his eyebrows asking her to respond. Regina nods her head obediently.

 

He smiles, and without further warning he pushes a finger into her, and she gasps, almost cries out, but catches herself, stops the sound in the middle of her throat, and he hums appreciatively, “Good, girl,” he says under his breath. He removes the finger, only to do it again, this time with two.

 

Watching her try and keep quiet, keep still, he pumps in and out of her with his hand, his thumb moving back and forth over the nub lying higher, sending tremors through Regina that she could hardly have expected, could hardly even have described. She jerks from time to time, with the feeling of it, and pants, quietly, her breathing picking up speed.

 

When a harder shake rocks her, she almost sits up with it, and her eyes flutter open. Regina finds Rumpelstiltskin watching her face intently, “You’re close, I think.”

 

“Am I?” she asks, hardly finding the breath to do so.

 

“Indeed you are,” he tells her flippantly, smirking-ly. He removes his fingers to work over that little spot with the wetness from within her, moving faster and faster. (distantly she wonders if his wrist grows sore). “Come on, dearie, let  yourself go to it,” he murmurs. His words are soothing, but his tone demanding. “Go on, relax—just let yourself.”

 

With a shake and a cry, Regina feels a gentle, powerful warmth wash over her, like a storm (and almost kind). Her body shakes in time to his movements, and her center too, beats and clenches (almost like it has a heartbeat all its own).  As Rumpelstiltskin’s fingers slow, so does her shaking. As she breathes heavily, eyes shut and incredibly tired for the exertion and the late hour, he absently puts his other hand to her cheek, as he did the night they met (for the second time, she reminds herself). 

 

“See, magic.” He jests, making himself laugh, as he pulls his hand away. With a wave, a spell returns her nightgown to properly covering her exposed legs, and Regina shivers for the night air grown chilly and the light sheen of sweat coating her. She looks over at him, her teacher, as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and cleans his hand. “Thank you,” she says, hesitantly, “for showing me,”

 

He looks down at her, “Think of it as a gift.” He turns abruptly, swinging his legs off the bed to stand.

 

Regina sits up, rolling to the warmth of where he’d just been. “When will I see you again?” she asks, quickly, surprising herself with how the question worries her, with how much she needs to know its answer. Her cheeks coloring, she tries to hide her concern, “To learn magic?”

 

He turns to look over his shoulder, “Worry you not, dearie, I’ll be back.” Smiling, baring his teeth to her, as if he’d just thought of something terribly funny, he adds, “Wouldn’t want you getting away twice on me.” With the last, he vanishes without so much as a puff of smoke or a fare-thee-well.

 

Regina looks around, but finds herself alone.

 

After a moment, she stands on shaky legs and goes to close the balcony doors. After they click shut, she rubs at her arms, against the cold, and walks back to bed, but stops when she catches her reflection in the mirror. She looks at her face, her mussed hair and wrinkled (though very fine) clothing, and wonders what the sorcerer saw in her.

 

Regina sighs, finding no answers, walks back to bed, and after blowing out the candle burned low, crawls under the covers to go to sleep.

 


End file.
